plantyhamchuk:

I highly recommend reading the original article it has lots of interesting graphics and pictures 

“Four months a year, Ferreira Sandes, 47, crisscrosses São Félix’s almost 85,000 square kilometers (33,000 square miles) in a four-by-four Chevrolet with a cowboy hat on the dash and a revolver under the seat. He’s on the hunt for 5,000 head of cattle to feed a pipeline pumping beef through slaughterhouses owned by Brazilian meatpacking giant JBS SA and others, then into markets from Miami to Hong Kong. The faster he hits his mark, the sooner he goes home. But the competition is fierce, the going slow. He visits three ranches a day—four, if he hustles—picking up 23 cows here, 68 there. For buyers like Ferreira Sandes, there’s no better haunt than São Félix do Xingu. At 2.4 million head, it’s home to Brazil’s largest herd. “If what you’re after is cattle,” he says, “you needn’t go anywhere else.”

But the municipality that’s as big as Ireland lays claim to a more notorious title too. It’s the deforestation capital of the world. Understanding how Brazil’s beef industry and rainforest destruction are inextricably intertwined reveals a truth that JBS doesn’t acknowledge: As the region’s biggest beef producer, its supply chain is also among the biggest drivers of Amazon deforestation the world has ever known. While marketing itself as a friend of the environment, JBS has snapped up more cattle coming out of the Amazon than any other meatpacker in an industry that’s overwhelmingly to blame for the rainforest’s demise. It has helped push the world’s largest rainforest to a tipping point at which it’s no longer able to clean the Earth’s air, because large swaths now emit more carbon than they absorb. Late last year, at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, governments and financial institutions—including JBS investors—made ambitious green commitments to drastically alter their business models to save the environment. With Amazon deforestation at a 15-year high, JBS is a case study illustrating how difficult it is to keep such promises.

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In a 2009 settlement with federal prosecutors, JBS and other slaughterhouses agreed not to buy animals from newly deforested land. While JBS did ramp up its monitoring, it also aggressively expanded in the Amazon and still doesn’t know where its cattle originate. 

To determine the size of JBS’s footprint, Bloomberg analyzed the coordinates on about 1 million cattle shipments. JBS has since restricted most of the data, which  cover an estimated 18 million cows sent to slaughterhouses in the states of Rondônia, Pará, Acre, Mato Grosso and Tocantins between 2009 and 2021. Bloomberg checked the data against more than 50,000 land registries and about 520,000 deforestation alerts.

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The posting was far from Azeredo’s first choice, but none of his senior colleagues in the federal public prosecutors’ office wanted it. In a nation wracked by violence and corruption, Pará state is particularly lawless. “Put it this way,” the now 40-year-old lawyer says, “When I arrived in 2007, there were some 30,000 to 40,000 individual fires burning across the Amazon each year, and regulators and police had no idea who was responsible.”

Once he got his boots dirty, he saw that this was the work of the cattle industry. More than 70% of deforested land in the Amazon turns into pasture, the first step in a supply chain that’s among the most complex in the world.

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On one end of the Brazilian beef supply chain are 2.5 million ranchers, many in far-flung corners of the Amazon without government offices, schools or even phones. On the other are corporate buyers in 80 countries, including fast-food chains, supermarkets and makers of leather shoes and handbags. 

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It [JBS] bought up rivals, including Bertin to become the world’s biggest leather producer, and drew the scrutiny of prosecutors and environmentalists.

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But cattle in Brazil move on average two or three times and as many as six before they are slaughtered, according to the Gibbs Land Use and Environment Lab at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. JBS systematically monitors only the final ranch or feedlot in a cow’s life. 

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Brazil is the world’s biggest beef producer and exporter, slaughtering 22.2 million cattle a year. In Amazon states, the figure rose to 10.2 million in 2020 from 8.7 million in 2009.

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At Nogueira’s lot, the branding is over within half an hour and Ferreira Sandes is back in his truck, crossing a vast river by ferry, driving so fast down dirt roads that the red dust makes it impossible to see too far ahead. By the time his day ends 12 hours later, he will have visited three other ranches, none of which lives up to Brazil’s rules and regulations, according to interviews and a cross check of the properties’ GPS coordinates and public records. One owner has been embargoed by Brazil’s environmental regulator; the second was flagged by the National Institute of Space Research for deforestation. Its manager talked freely about moving cattle to a plot next door to make a sale. The owner of the final ranch, a self-possessed matriarch named Divina, openly doctors vaccination records with the help of a local government official and an animal-supply store clerk before she can get her GTA issued. Side deals, workarounds, hustles—that’s how it’s always been in cattle country, Divina says. “We don’t have government, education or infrastructure here,” she says. “All we have is each other and our ranches, and so we do whatever we need to do to get by.” It’s a sentiment shared by more than a dozen ranchers interviewed during Bloomberg’s journey through the region. But it’s a trip JBS’s supply-chain auditors have never made. “No protocol requires ‘on-site visits to direct suppliers,’” JBS said about its monitoring commitments.

Whether or not any of the cows Ferreira Sandes buys will end up at JBS slaughterhouses is impossible to know. The Lageado farm, like thousands of other direct suppliers in the company’s ecosystem, is a mixing pot. A 2020 study published in Science magazine found that such intermingling means more than half of all beef exports from the region to the European Union may be tainted by deforestation.

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But the scope of the actual deforestation in the area since 2009 is staggering. The space institute issued 20,000 alerts in the period highlighting where the rainforest has been clear-cut. As long as no alert overlaps a direct supplier’s ranch at the time of purchase, JBS is free to buy from them.